The Gitmo game that almost was

Back in March, the Scottish game developer company T-enterprise announced the upcoming release of Rendition: Guantanamo. The game was set in the near future (2010 by some reports, 2020 by others,) after the US had officially closed the infamous prison camp and it had been taken over by sinister scientists who were now performing experiments on the remaining prisoners. The story followed Adam, an innocent man who had been wrongly locked up as a terrorist. Moazzam Begg, who was actually a detainee at Guantanamo, served as adviser on the project and even appeared in the game as a (non-playable) character.

It was an astonishingly bad idea for a game, using the extremely controversial Guantanamo prison as a backdrop for a trashy genre story that sounded like one of the lesser Sci-Fi Channel original movies. Conservatives eagerly pounced on T-enterprise, accusing them of promoting terrorism. The game's clumsy premise was widely misrepresented by the media, who made it sound much more sinister than it really was. In this clip, the howler monkeys at Fox News claimed that Begg was the lead character, and the game followed his escape from the camp as he killed American soldiers. (In fact, no US or British soldiers died in the game. You only shot mercenaries who were acting as camp guards.) There were even claims that the game would be used to raise funds for Al-Qaeda, something T-enterprise staunchly denied.

Earlier this month, T-enterprise bowed to pressure, shelved the game and pulled the trailer off Youtube. Conservatives have done a lot of gloating since. (Depressingly, some reports are still falsely claiming the game involved a heroic terrorist killing US soldiers.)

Perhaps the most ironic part of all this is that while we've seen plenty of conservative pundits getting themselves moist with outrage over some version of the game that never really existed, nobody on the right or left seemed to be criticizing the game for what was arguably its one real crime: trivializing the very real suffering of the innocent Guantanamo detainees who were held without trial and tortured, and spinning their story into pulpy genre entertainment complete with armed mercenaries and mad scientists.

Speaking with the site Deadline Scotland in May, Begg defended his involvement in the game.

"The only thing I am concerned about it making sure the game does not misrepresent the prisoners (...) This will not demean the reality of Guantanamo but it could bring those issues to people who would not usually think about it."

Maybe he was right. Maybe Rendition: Guantanamo would have allowed people to see a complex, real world issue in a new way by looking at it through the filter of fantasy. Maybe the game was a travesty, or maybe it was an unlikely masterpiece. We'll never know. As is the case with so many things related to Guantanamo, this has become an awful, confusing mess - just a lot of questions without any good answers.

All of this is not to say that it's impossible to handle Gitmo in game form. Nonny de la Pena and Peggy Weil's Second Life environment Gone Gitmo offers a much more realistic take on the prison, with players held captive in a grim, 3D approximation of the camp. You can hardly even call it a "game," since it's absolutely no fun at all. But then, that's sort of the point.

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